Four factors on why crowdsourcing can make you ready for future of work

The media and business portals these days are taking lot of interest in impact of (AI) Artificial Intelligence and (ML) Machine Learning. And they put emphasis on how professionals needs to get worried as many jobs will become obsolete due to these technologies and will impact future of work.

However, according to a future of work report by PWC, not every skill can be replaced by AI/Robots in near future. Few skills still makes us different from robots and needs to be honed to ensure we keep ourselves relevant. And those are:

Empathy, Creativity & Innovation, Adaptability & Problem Solving

These are not functional skills which typically can be enhanced in a single company/role. So how can you hone the above?

There can be multiple ways for sure like reading relevant books and joining courses but I am more believer in learning by doing. Unless you expose yourselves to situational environments where these skills are brought at forefront, it will be tough to assess yourself on these skills. Crowdsourcing can bring that environment to you because it helps you get exposed to variety of problems.

If you contribute in a crowdsourcing platform on a regular basis:

You face diverse problems in a lesser time – Most of the crowdsourcing platforms use the concept of challenges and you can participate in as many as you like. Thus exposing you to different problems at one point of time. This can help you enhance the adaptability and problem solving skills.

You can be both at demand and supply side simultaneously – Now this is again one interesting aspect which typically is not available in a normal job. For example, say if you are a coder, you can both solve other coder problems as well as post a problem. This way, since you get to see both demand and supply, the empathy for each other bounds to get appreciated.

The need to differentiate yourself gets tested immensely – Now as crowdsourcing platforms are designed in a way that a company would evaluate your solution against multiple others, to stand a chance to win (in case of competition style) or to get your solution accepted, you have to ensure the solution has some novelty and creativity.

You can hone multiple functional skills – Another big advantage, thanks to startups tapping variety of use cases is that you just need to think of what are you passionate about, and a startup might be already there who can help you gain some credibility – Coding, design, UX, product management, finance, digital marketing, writing, cooking, share trading, music. You just need to be proactive and leverage these platforms to boost your career.

I foresee that in next few years as automation eats up more and more traditional jobs, more users will lap up crowdsourcing platforms to pursue multiple work skills and hobbies as a permanent job will be a thing of past and most companies will use crowdsourcing to both identify solutions as well as get the right talent.

Would love to know what’s your experience has been so far with such platforms? If you use it, what motivates you? If not, what stops you?

About The Author

Nishith is a digital generalist having extensive experience in solving customer problems with the help of technology based products and platforms. His wide variety of experience across MNCs like Verizon & Infosys, nimble startups like ThoughtBuzz and his own current entrepreneurial venture UX Hack has helped him appreciate different facets of a digital business and functions. His current excitement as a founder of a UX crowdsourcing platform - uxhack.co, is about marrying the effective use of crowdsourcing in product management functions of an organization.